Black Flag is for the kids? How desperate can they go? I have nothing against children, I work with them, but sometimes I want them out of my life, really! And they should not get close to my music at the risk to spoil everything. However, that’s not what Ginn’s Black-Flag new reincarnation thinks! They will play a show with stripped down Black Flag songs for the kids at Reggies in Chicago on June 17th… And I am not joking .
May be that’s a new outlet for Greg Ginn’s new band, I heard that the tickets were not selling as fast as expected? So I don’t know if Mike Vallely will change his language but last time I saw him he was saying a lot of fuck… Definitively not good for the kids. And what does stripped down mean in this case? Less loud? Less screaming?
Black Flag is no kids’ music, we can all agree on this, so what are they gonna play ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’? I guess all chidren can understand this concept, but it’s gonna be a little bit harder for ‘Rise Above’, ‘Black Coffee’, ‘Damaged’, ‘Wasted’ or ‘Six Packs’ and when Vallely is gonna sing ‘This fucking city/Is run by pigs/They take the rights/Away from all the kids’ there’s gonna be a kid riot. Are they gonna change the lyrics?
So, is it the nail on the coffin for the hardcore band? May be not, there’s a whole new market there. By searching for Black Flag & children, I found a whole new universe, like these adorable Lego t-shirt or black bottles baby onesies inspired by the Black Flag logo.
But my favorite thing is probably this video posted by Noisey, showing cute English kids explaining the meaning of punk (‘punk is like when mommy and daddy tell you to do something and you don’t do it’, good luck mom and dad!) and moshing to Black Flag music. The best part is when they say that Henry Rollins is horrifying!
